Pushing Circles

I am trying to make a circle on an Evalpoint drive it through a grid of circles, and push them away as it goes through. Like if you put a bunch of coins on a table and moves one of them with your finger and bumps into the others.

This problem got me thinking in circles too, like I need the circles to know where the points will go and the points to know where the circles are.

I guess there will be some scripting involved, but i hope not

Any ideas?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on October 8, 2011 at 4:41am

like this ?

I think this problem is unavoidably iterative, so will require either scripting, hoopsnake or kangaroo.

In Kangaroo, this is done with springs between the centres of all the circles which only have an effect when they are closer than the sum of their radii.

Permalink Reply by Jon Kniven on October 9, 2011 at 9:29pm

Thats pretty close!, except I would like it if the pushed circles did not try to close the gaps, but left a cleared path.

I guess what I need is somewhere to store the points that has been pushed away from their original position, but I get my inputpoints from a divided surface and I dont really understand how not to overwrite the new displaced coordinates. Is it possible to actually move referenced rhinopoints with grasshopper?

Attachments:

pusher.ghx, 218 KB

Permalink Reply by Jon Kniven on October 19, 2011 at 9:54am

In the end it turned out to be enough just to make a variable static, but in my n00biness I took a week to figure this out. Heres the script:

Sub RunScript(ByVal evalPoint As On3dPoint, ByVal pushThreshold As Double, ByVal gridpts As List(Of On3dPoint), ByVal ringpts As List(Of On3dPoint), ByVal RESET As Boolean)

Static _lista As List(Of On3dPoint)

If ((_lista Is Nothing) Or (RESET = True)) Then

_lista = New List(Of On3dPoint)

For Each punkt As On3dPoint In gridpts

_lista.Add(punkt)

End If

Dim k As Integer

k = 0
For Each pt As On3dPoint In _lista

Dim n As Double

n = pt.DistanceTo(evalPoint)

If (n < pushThreshold) Then

_lista(k).Set(ringpts(k))
End If